“Being a director is being a watcher,” Brian De Palma says in “De Palma,” a documentary in which one of the most voyeuristic directors in American cinema delivers an engaging, if maddeningly unresolved, tutorial in film production and appreciation.
Directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, obviously with keen interest in reminding viewers of their subject’s importance, “De Palma” takes the form of an illustrated monologue, cutting together shots of De Palma talking about his childhood, early career, visual philosophy (and throwing in lots of juicy asides about his collaborators along the way), and juxtaposing them with clips from his movies, as well as those of the directors who influenced them.
Anyone familiar with De Palma’s oeuvre — which includes “Phantom of the Paradise,” “Dressed To Kill,” “Body Double” and “Blow Out,” among many others — knows that De Palma’s chief muse has been Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, Baumbach and Paltrow begin “De Palma” with a scene from “Vertigo,” which De Palma astutely analyzes as a meditation on the act of filmmaking itself, wherein the director creates “a beautiful illusion,” then kills it.
The son of a Philadelphia physician, the man best known for drenching Sissy Spacek in buckets of blood in “Carrie” and sending Al Pacino face down into a pile of cocaine in “Scarface” emerges here as an erudite, engaging storyteller, as willing to dish on Cliff Robertson’s perpetually tanned vanity while shooting “Obsession” as he is to explain why the tracking shot in “Carlito’s Way” is a more emotional choice than a conventional, cut-together montage. He’s just as disarmingly candid when discussing his most famous flops, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Mission to Mars.”
An anecdote regarding Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox on the set of “Casualties of War” is priceless, as are sequences from De Palma’s early films, which starred a brand new actor named Bob De Niro (who worked again with De Palma in “The Untouchables,” at a much higher day rate). But as valuable as “De Palma” is as a tutorial in 20th century film history, viewers may still wish that Baumbach and Paltrow had been more probing when it came to De Palma’s weaknesses (he’s a far more accomplished visual stylist than a writer), and his predilection for the sexualized brutalization of women.
Whether a matter of sexual fetish or psychological preoccupation, De Palma’s fascination with female suffering deserves more scrutiny than a glib, dismissive shrug — and would have been far more interesting to hear about than, say, De Palma’s work on Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video.
